Susan Gunelius does a great job of suggesting how to put to good use the content curation potential on your own blog site.

Here her first two recommendations:

1) Publish Editorialized Content that You've Curated:It's important to understand the difference between content aggregation, content syndication, and content curation before you can effectively curate content to publish on your blog.

2) Publish Curated Round-up Blog Posts:You could publish a weekly round-up post where you share links and descriptions of great content from multiple sources about a specific topic. You can even add your own brief commentary with each link.

I've gotten a couple of inquires from some of the people who subscribe to my ScoopIt feeds about where I was, so I'm doing this final post.

I mostly update my ScoopIt topics when I'm traveling, and that (for me) means using a laptop with internet served via a tethered smartphone. Every since ScoopIt had that huge DoS attack which shut the service down, my T-Mobile tether has stopped serving ScoopIt domain pages.

The issue is with T-Mobile, but they are not dealing with it. I tried to get ScoopIt to take action, but they have refused. Bottom-line is this platform is no longer one I can easily use, so I've stopped using it.

Thanks to everyone for reading and for the excellent commentary over the years. Enjoy the interweaves!

Yahoo is one of the many technology companies demanding reforms on US surveillance laws, and now says it's taken additional security measures to protect data it handles. Today the company announced...

Asil's insight:

"Our goal is to encrypt our entire platform for all users at all time, by default." In a meeting with reporters today, Stamos — who joined Yahoo three weeks ago — did not specifically call out the National Security Agency by name, but made it clear that revelations about NSA spying led directly to Yahoo's move toward more encryption. "

True Detective is a compelling show. People love the acting and are thrilled by the mystery. No arguments there. But two recent interviews with people who worked on it highlight another reason the show works: the petrochemical landscape of Louisiana.

"I have great respect for the way the place and time of the events in the story echo and amplify the emotional lives of the characters that inhabit it. This link—the relationship between broken landscapes and broken people—has been central to all our thinking," he wrote.

"This isn't the zombie plague. This isn't vampires and warlocks. The phrase that has been echoing in my head since our first discussions on the project is that we are witnessing a 'personal apocalypse.'"

I tried this out on some longish pieces...1000 words or more. The tool did a very good job of reducing several articles by about 50-60% in size, while preserving very well the meaning of the selection. I did this about 4 times and was quite impressed with the quality of the summaries. This could prove quite useful for students of all ages, as well as busy educators.

Located near the Red Sea in El Gouna, Egypt, Desert Breath is an impossibly immense land art installation dug into the sands of the Sahara desert by the D.A.ST. Arteam back in 1997. The artwork was a collaborative effort spanning two years between installation artist Danae Stratou, industrial designer Alexandra Stratou, and architect Stella Constantinides, and was meant as an exploration of infinity against the backdrop of the largest African desert. Covering an area of about 1 million square feet (100,000 square meters) the piece involved the displacement of 280,000 square feet (8,000 square meters) of sand and the creation of a large central pool of water.

Late in 2013, spider.io, a UK-based company dedicated to fighting advertising fraud, posted a video to its website.

Asil's insight:

The terms of the Spider.io deal were not announced, but its fraud detection software will be included with Google ad offerings and its detection expertise is now part of the Google family. Presuming it wasn’t bought by Google with the intention of quieting the one company that’s been pointing out how dubious your major stream of revenue can be, it is a positive move in getting out in front of the awkward spambot issue that online advertisers can’t seem to shake.

In the past few years, the science of Internet trollology has made some strides. Last year, for instance, we learned that by hurling insults and inciting discord in online comment sections, so-called Internet trolls (who are frequently anonymous) have a polarizing effect on audiences, leading to politicization, rather than deeper...

Asil's insight:

The study comes as websites, particularly at major media outlets, are increasingly weighing steps to rein in trollish behavior. Last year Popular Science did away with its comments sections completely, citing research on the deleterious effects of trolling, and YouTube also took measures to rein in trolling.

Salar did an amazing job growing YouTube and everyone is thankful for his efforts; he’s a class act who quietly built the product into the most important asset at Google.

Literally, the most important thing at Google--the land of important things.

Heck, that is coming from me, a person who walked away from YouTube funding and massive growth in viewership because it was clear that there is no room given the current split (55/45) for anyone but Google to make a living. More on that in a bit.

In this piece I want to talk about three things:

1. Why YouTube is the most important product at Google--by far

2. Why Google is blowing it

3. A simple solution for Susan to fix the problem

Asil's insight:

n fact, it’s fairly clear to [Jason Calacanis], who has been working with Google since Day One, that Google thinks of content creators--artists--as this necessary evil to put their ads next to.

They don’t really respect us since they won everything. If they did, they would listen to our needs and think about making their platform sustainable.

They don’t listen any more really (that is, unless you need help implementing their advertising technology).

Have a question on how to optimize your ads? They’re all ears!

ABOUT

LAUNCH Media covers and celebrates new startups, products, services and technology on the LAUNCH blog, an email newsletter and an in-person conference. Serial entrepreneur, angel investor and journalist Jason Calacanis founded LAUNCH in December 2010.

I did a demo for this ... http://neovictoria.pressly.com/ ... but I'm not loving it. Some good stuff, in terms of ads and analytics, but edits to the hubs don't appear to update in real-time and I'm not seeing a way to design the HUB. It appears to only give two views.

LAS VEGAS — Your future contact lenses could give you superhuman vision Just one year after eyewear startup Innovega announced a prototype of its high-tech iOptik lenses, the company is showing off the product at this year's International CES.

Asil's insight:

"A lot of companies are trying to do that right now with hardware, and there are limitations: It creates a tiny field of view," an iOptik spokesperson told Mashable. "Google Glass is the equivalent of having your smartphone about 24 inches in front of you. The iOptik system is six times the resolution and 20 times the area. It's like looking at a big TV projection, and you can see so much more."

The Innovega eyewear system is made up of two parts: glasses and contact lenses. The contact lenses give you enhanced focusing abilities, so you can see near and far at levels beyond what the normal eye can see. For example, if you put a finger up to your eye while wearing the contacts, you can actually see the fine details of your fingerprint; whereas, the natural eye can't focus on an object so close up.

Reading is one of the basic literacy skills we learn from the first years of our schooling.As we grow up this skill develops and takes many forms. It actually stays with us for the rest of our life. And like any other skill, the more you work on it the better it gets. That is why we have now great writers it is because they were once great readers.

Apple, Google and Microsoft appear to be unaffected, along with the major e-banking services. Yahoo, on the other hand, was affected and leaking user credentials for a significant portion of the day before its core sites were fixed. More generally, any server running OpenSSL on Apache or Nginx will be affected, which implicates a huge variety of everyday websites and services.

I put a ticket in with ScoopIt asking them to advise what the situation is with their servers. So far, have only received the automatic response. I'm still not finding anything official posted by ScoopIt themselves, but a user has started a ScooptIt topic on the exploit: http://www.scoop.it/t/heartbleed

Shockya.com Eliza Dushku Stars in Kevin Tancharoen's Sci-Fi Short Gable V Shockya.com 'Gable V,' which Tancharoen describes as being a sci-fi, futuristic version of 'The Truman Show,' is now available on Machinima Prime, which is the dominant video...

In a remote location, a secret facility exists unlike anything the world has ever seen. Run by Dr. Conrad Gable, a renowned neurologist, the facility is years ahead of it’s time when it comes to the technology it’s using to research the human body. With an unlimited budget backed by a classified department of the government, Dr. Gable’s motives appear to be for the greater good of humanity. The chance to create a drug so powerful it could be used to win every battle, every war, with no casualties. Now all he needs are, 5 test subjects.

The Guardian Why The Future Of Technology Is All Too Human Forbes By the 1970's, funding dried up and technology entered the period now known as the AI winter, during which very little happened. Slowly, however, progress was made.

Asil's insight:

The obvious question that all of this raises is, if computers are doing the work of humans, what are all the people going to do? We work, after all, not just for bread, but for dignity and purpose. The automation of labor is nothing less than the great social dilemma of our generation.

Don't worry about the Comcast deal. Be happy Yes, the cable giant's $45 billion bid to take over Time Warner makes an uncompetitive cable industry worse. Yes, Comcast will now have a disproportionate control of Internet service in major U.S.

Asil's insight:

This is a real "making lemonade from lemons" piece. Hope the author is right about Google fiber, 'cause the only cable service provider worse than Time Warner is Comcast!

As friendly as that fan-creator relationship may seem, it’s actually a delicate thing. And in the end, Zubernis and Larsen say, it’s mostly artifice. “[The relationship] seems a lot more reciprocal and closer than it is, which is an artifact of the way social media, especially Twitter, makes fans feel,” says Zubernis. “I always stay on Twitter when a Supernatural episode is airing, and the actors and the writers and directors are usually on [Twitter], and I see what it does to fans when somebody answers their tweet. There’s a need, I think, to feel like, ‘They’re listening to me; I’m important.’ That’s a normal psychological response, but it’s not actually true; it’s wishful thinking. It’s a constructed intimacy that’s not really intimate at all.”

Devon Maloney: "Regardless of how much influence fans may seem to wield or how close the fans and creators may seem in a today’s era of meet-and-greets and panels, a chasm still exists between the people who make shows and the people who ardently love them."

It's all about sales. In the end it is phoney and leaves me feeling it was all meaningless, empty and that I have just been used. Selling autographs is just one tiny step away from the social media puffing up being done these days.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.